Synopsis

Luffy and crew arrive at the harbour of Anabaru. The local casino is holding a competition in which the winner will obtain a huge monetary reward if he reaches the finishing line first. Nami is elated and decides to participate in the competition. However, there is a conspiracy going behind the competition and the mastermind is an ex-military commander, Gasparde. His plan is to lure all the pirates to the military base and send them to their deaths. Luffy and gang have to overcome the numerous tests and tribulations along the way to complete this dead-end adventure.

Well this is the 4th One Piece move that was made and IMO it is still the best.

story: The story follows the straw hats pirates while they are on a Island and in need of money, they soon find out that there is a great pirate race. That alone should be good enough to catch anyones interest. The whole movie is amazing and the enemy is one you can hate.

Art: The only reason that I didnt give this a 10 is because One Piece is art style is a little differnt to other animes but it is true to itself and is even better.

Characters: Great
characters, if you follow the series I dont need to say anymore, if you dont then all I have to say is you will never see better characters than this group.

Enjoyment: I love this movie, it is the best out there and I have seen it many times and each time it still makes me smile.

STORY: As you probably are expecting since it's a One Piece movie, the story is original and whacky, revolving around a Pirate Race where everything goes. Besides all the issues you could expect from a movie story such as rushed presentation and such, the story does look interesting and even has a nice twist.

ART: It's One Piece with all it's might. On the other hand, it's One Piece with all it's might, which might not make you happy due to it's particular, peculiar and bizarre art style and design. Nontheless, the art is very refreshing and original, you can't deny that. It also features enhanced
animation in comparison to the anime, although it's not that great. One thing I could mention is the backgrounds and the sea, as well as the ship movements, all that is awesome.

SOUND: The sound qaulity itself it's nice, with a couple of nice new battle tunes and as always the brilliant voice acting of really great seyiuus like Mayumi Tanaka, Kazuya Nakai and Kappei Yamaguchi.

CHARACTER: Though non-canon the movie provides some insight in the world of One Piece showing two more Giants, an old rival of Arlong and some other nice new characters. The two main movie-only characters would probably Shuraiya and Gasparde, the main villain. The first sport an awesome look, and the villain just looks like a couple more of other villains in One Piece: thinks dreams are for the weak and the crewmembers are just underlings. Though it has a pretty nice background and look.

ENJOYMENT: I only gave this 7, yeah. The first reason is that probably most people don't get the motivation they need to watch the movie since it's non-canon. So that pretty much lowers the enjoyment level of a movie, particularly, a non-canon anime movie. Secondly, although the three major fights in the movie are really good (Shurayia and Luffy vs Gasparde's crew, Needles vs Shurayia and Luffy vs Gasparde), there's not much importace to the rest of the Straw Hats, the simply don't have a final fight, which I think is also bad.

OVERALL: Although I have only watched the first 4 movies of One Piece, I think this is by far the best, with some pretty nice story, characters and all that you expect from One Piece. You should definitly watch it if you're a One Piece fan.

I thought the beginning plot for this movie was fine at first and they hype up this Dead End Adventure, the Pirate Ship Race (which gets interrupted and just felt bland) and the story of Shuraiya and his backstory and what not. I think with these three written on paper it sounds like it should be a good movie but I personally felt it fell short in the execution department as certain parts felt drawn out all of characters in the straw hat character didn't really do anything in this movie and I felt
the pacing was was off as there was a lot of boring dialogue scenes and had me dozing off honestly. Too much uninteresting things I felt was going on in this 4th movie of One Piece.

Art and Animation (6/10) Fine

Continuing with this annual repetition of release the 4th One Piece movie yearly at the point of this movie coming out of course. The only major difference I saw between this an the last movie is that during the beginning they tried to do this 3rd 1st person view of going through a town at night seeing all the people of the town until we eventually get to the Straw Hat Crew who is in a restaurant of some sort getting their grub on like always. I understand the idea of what this scene was trying to do and it probably looked good back in 2003 but I don't think it aged well at all because this is really slow frame rate 3D presentation honestly just hurt my eyes. The camera angles were cool but the fact that it felt like an introduction to a 1999 computer game before you hit the title screen just didn't sit well with me. Other than that everything else seem fine for a One Piece movie as far as the 4 that I've seem to this point. This one doesn't look any better than the 3 that came before it and it's not surprising since this (just like movie 2) came out almost exactly a year after the 3rd movie so advancements in the art style and animation category obviously made no improvements.

Sound (7/10) Good
Nothing to compliment but nothing to complain about. The BGM and voice actors were fine. Outro is fine also not bad not amazing it just exist so yeah..

Characters (6/10) Fair

Like I said in the story section majority of the characters in the Straw Hat Crew hit the back-burner hard in this movie. As we really only get to see mostly Luffy and not that much either. This movie tried to push the movie MC mostly and his introduction started off good. Shuraiya with Luffy in the like the first 15 or so minutes of the movie and they are about to throw down but the main antagonist comes in and interrupts their fight as they basically say "we'll fight later". To me that's Toei basically hyping up a fight we never saw and at this point who cares because the Movie MC Shuraiya get's his ass whooped around the end of this movie anyway so I didn't even want to see the fight between him and Luffy anymore. His backstory with him and his sister (who didn't even looked like she aged since her backstory) was boring and uninteresting and since the movie gave him so much screen time I personally think he's the reason why I was dozing off during this movie. The other characters like the straw hat crew when they were doing something was good but like I said we don't get to see them that much, I usually give this section a 8, 9 and sometimes a 10. But that's only because I enjoy seeing the Straw Hat crew do what they do, when they are taken out of the picture my score in the section will most likely dwindle if the characters they focus on can't suffice for replacement.

Enjoyment (5/10) Mediocre

My enjoyment was not that high for this movie, I was honestly expecting more from it. And I like I said earlier I personally think they failed to capture my attention with this movie with the various things this movie tried to bring to the table. My interested raise just a tad at the very end when Luffy is fighting the Movie Villain and his Candy Syrup powers or what ever when he messes up Luffy's hat and the various signature moves Luffy was using against him. It was a good fight but I don't think it was enough for me to forgive the rest of my boredom I had for the other hour and like ten minutes I was watching the movie for.

Overall (5/10) Mediocre
More Specifically (5.80/10) Mediocre at best

Dead End no Bouken in my opinion is probably the most boring of One Piece movies yet. It's down there with the 2nd movie and I like I said earlier if they focus on the Straw Hat crew then we can have a more entertaining movie, hopefully the future ones don't follow this template of letting the movie MC have all the spot light just to get whooped and end the movie with a Luffy fight because I don't think that's a good formula.

Story: As far as One Piece movies go before this one, this story is the most fresh and close to cannon as possible. The Straw Hats, short on money due to their captains endless stomach, enter a pirate race in order to earn some fast cash. Only, this race isn't what it's cracked up to be. Unlike the last few movies before this one, which follow pretty much the same design, this movie seems to be different and unique.

Art: The art was great and kept with the original animation, with some enhancements due to being a movie. There was some lazy
animation using show flashbacks, but it was to improve and explain the story so I didn't mind them much.

Sound: The sound was really great. Up to this point in the show, sometimes you could tell the voice actors were in a room shouting their lines, in this movie, you couldn't hear that. Also, the themes swelled up at just the right times to create great musicality.

Characters: This was the department where the movie hit it's snag and earned it's no 10 outcome. They had an annoying kid. Every One Piece movies downfall with me has been the tired but true annoying kid character. Nobody likes the annoying kid. They should just leave the annoying kid out, but I don't live in Japan and who knows, the annoying kid could be another annoying kids hero or something. Also, the villain seemed to be a hodgepodge of the different villains prior on the TV show. Other then that, everything else was fine. All of the other characters were left in tact and useful. It was nice to see Robin's power used.

Enjoyment: I got a lot of enjoyment of of the film. It was longer then the other movies previous and a lot to sit through, but it never got boring. I only stopped to go back to a funny part or to read what everyone was saying in the background.

Overall: A great movie. I wasn't expecting much with the previous movies leaving me a tad disappointed, but this one made up for all of them. A great watch and I'm sure I'll be re-watching it in the future. A must watch if you are a fan and want to watch a good One Piece movie. Skip the others before this one and watch this one instead.